For the longest time, the default search provider in Ubuntu Linux has been Google, but this is going to change in the next release, Lucid Lynx, scheduled to release April 29. The change comes after Canonical has signed a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo!, so you can imagine who the new default search provider will be.

But they can include Chromium, the open source part of Chrome, and choose whether they want to compile it with h264 support or not. There is even a PPA repository with daily snapshots where the codecs are optional (free or nonfree).